[Divunal-devel] darkness...

[Tenth]

On Mon, 23 Aug 1999, Phil Christensen wrote:

> 1.) When (in RL) you're in a dark room, you may not be able to see
> anything, but you can still pick up object in the room, if you know
> where it is.
> 2.) Given that in TR, you "know where an object is" by knowing it's
> name, you should still be able to take/use something in a dark room,
> providing you know it's name (which would not be supplied by a dark
> version of look). After all, you can exit a dark room, even though you
> can't see any of the exits.

     Hmm... Well, it does stand to reason that (for example) if you
just put something on the floor, or a nearby piece of furniture, and the
lights go out, you should be able to find it again. And if you know your
trusty old brass lantern is nearby somewhere, you should be able to find
it eventually.

     However, note that word "eventually".  :-)  While it is sort of
unfair to be totally unable to do anything if it's dark, it also makes
dark a lot less interesting if you're totally uninhibited by it. I guess a
middle ground (not being able to see, but still being able to refer to
things by name) would be nice, but I think it might be more interesting
(and not too terribly much more complicated, assuming you can get darkness
to work in the first place) if there was a chance that any attempts to
interact with other Things in the room might fail, and that the failure
was something along the lines of "You blunder around in the dark." If you
_think_ you know where an object is, it might still take you a few
attempts to find it, and you wouldn't know immediately if it was gone.

    And while combat isn't a big part of the game, darkness does make life
interesting. Ideally, like the interaction described above, you could
attempt to attack a specific person, but there would be a chance that you
would totally miss them in the dark, and wouldn't necessarily know if they
were still in the room or not. (You could even go as far as having a
chance of randomly attacking someone else by accident, but that's leaning
towards the much sillier and more complex side of things.)

    And on this topic (sorry, this has gotten a lot longer than I wanted),
isn't it going to be difficult to distinguish between "visible" and
"audible" actions? Our newly working perspectives feature could change
player names to "someone" in the dark, we can use the "hidden" boolean on
socials to determine if they work in the dark or not... But that still
leaves a lot of other miscellaneous effects. It would be safer just to say
that things other than non-hidden socials, speech, and special effects
that are directed at the player (being attacked, hearing telepathic
messages, etc.) don't show up in the dark, but that doesn't always work,
either. (You can't see Gates in the dark, but can you still hear the sound
of fabric rending?)  It's certainly a lot easier just to say that you
can't do much of anything in the dark...

     Any ideas?

- Tenth